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Visiting Our Past: Next stop, Beacham’s Curve, West Asheville

Rob Neufeld, Columnist
Published 10:34 p.m. ET June 18, 2017

Streetcar tracks were built into the 1911 West Asheville Bridge, as revealed in this postcard image, circa 1915, looking east from West Asheville toward the Asheville Cotton Mill area. Photo from the N.C. Collection, Pack Memorial Library.(Photo: Courtesy of Pack Memorial Library)

The first thing you might want to know about Beacham’s Curve, the big turn after the bridge in West Asheville, is: Who’s Beacham?

In the early 1900s, there were two Beacham men — Edward and his older brother Thomas — living in the newly developed place now called East West Asheville (which should be called Beacham, I think). They were both electric railway conductors and drove the streetcar from Pack Square to its western terminus at the curve.

In 1912, Edward lived with his wife, Bessie, and their two daughters — 9-year-old Lena and 5-year-old Edna — either at the corner of Haywood Road and Swannanoa Avenue (where WNC Community Health Services has now turned a church into a community center) or at 54 Brownstone Ave.

(The 1922 city directory says the Beacham home was on Brownwood; deeds reveal a 1906 purchase at Swannanoa Avenue. Directories before 1922 did not extend to West Asheville.)

Electric streetcars had been a bold venture in 1888 when construction began on Asheville’s line. There had been competing proposals for a horse car and a steam-powered train system.

The prevailing electric Asheville Street Railway rolled out its first three cars at noon, Feb. 1, 1889, before a large crowd on a track built from Pack Square to the depot. Four lines would be added in the 1890s: Charlotte Street; Biltmore to Grace up what is now Merrimon Avenue; Patton Avenue; and Riverside Park (in Montford) to West Asheville.

The West Asheville route originally used Carrier Bridge (now the site of the Amboy Road bridge) and the tracks of another company, which went broke. It wasn’t until 1911 that the Asheville Electric Co., new owners of the system, built tracks down the center of the concrete bridge on Asheville Highway (now the West Asheville RiverLink Bridge on Haywood Road) as part of its construction.

“Asheville is acknowledged to have one of the most modern street car electric light and power plants to be found … in the world,” a full-page ad for Asheville Power & Light stated. “Asheville was the third city in the world to have an electric street railway in successful operation. The first was Richmond, Va., and the second, Bangor, Me.”

By 1912, AP&L had merged with the local gas plant and spent a lot of ad money seeking customers for gas ranges as well as electricity.

Streetcars were a World’s Fair-like wonder, and people threw parties on them. Conductors were drivers, machinists, city boosters, lawmen and very visible hard workers.

“In those days,” David Bailey and others write in “Trolleys in the Land of the Sky,” “the carmen worked two shifts, nine-hour work days, Sundays included. The first cars pulled out at 5:20 a.m., and the last cars pulled in between 11:15 and 11:45 p.m.”

Edward Beacham became the president of the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, and, an “In Memoriam” newspaper column said in 1938, one year after his death, “was best known in his community as a high type labor union man,”. He also “was responsible for building some of the better homes in West Asheville, some of which are located on Beacham’s Curve.”

Dateline 1926

In order to get a personal view of the streetcar route from Pack Square to West Asheville, let’s follow the footsteps of 7-year-old West Asheville resident Clayton Harmon in 1926.

In my 2001 interview with Harmon, he recalled the day he went with his mom to the Racket Store on Biltmore Avenue in Asheville. The store drew attention to itself by electronically hammering a clapper against a metal plate, advertising its name without words.

Clayton was the youngest of seven sons, and a survivor. A younger brother had died in infancy a few years before, and his immediate older brother, Robert, had drowned playing in the French Broad River just the previous year.

Clayton’s mother, Pauline Chandley Harmon, had been looking at coats in the store when he found himself alone amid the racks. She had probably gone to show her soaps and bottles to a store clerk, he thought, for she had become a door-to-door salesperson for the California Perfume Company.

The Harmons needed some extra income. Clayton’s father, Robert Taylor Harmon, a flagman on the Murphy Branch of the Southern Railway, had been unsure about keeping his job and had taken a three-month leave of absence to study piano tuning at the Faust School of Tuning in Boston.

When he came back, the Harmons bought a Virginia Avenue home.

Their neighbor, Mrs. Adella Rhudy, was the sponsor for the women who represented the California Perfume Company in the Asheville area. It was her dog, a Chinese Chow adopted by the Harmons and named Ming Toy, that Robert had taken down Virginia Avenue and Amboy Road to the river the day that the area boys had cried, “the Harmon boy is drowning,” and no one had believed them because they had previously raised such an alarm as a joke. Ming Toy later made it home alone.

In the Racket Store, Mrs. Harmon continued to talk her talk. Her son Ralph’s leg, once scraped raw in a bicycle accident, had healed with Dr. Zabriskie’s Cutaneous Soap, she liked to say.

Clayton felt suffocated. He had a fear of drowning. He had resisted accepting Jesus in the Calvary Baptist Church because he knew he could never go underwater in the glass baptismal. In Sunday school, he had learned that Jesus had once gotten lost and had been found in a temple at age 12. Clayton thought he could put off being born again until that age.

The experience of being born again, Clayton revealed, had been a gradual thing, not a sudden immersion. He compared it to the kind of harmony arrived at in piano tuning, his father’s second profession and Clayton’s lifelong career.

“You have to take it one step at a time,” he said, “and if there’s the slightest error in tuning at any of the gradual steps, the error gets compounded and the whole instrument goes way off.”

7-year-old’s odyssey

In the store, little Clayton, feeling oppressed, said to himself, “I’ve got to go home,” and he directed himself the only way he could, by following the streetcar tracks back to West Asheville.

Head down, he passed through Pack Square, where the cars congregated, and turned down Patton Avenue.

The circling lights of the Imperial Theater distracted Clayton momentarily. It was here that his brother Ralph had taken him to see “The Eagle of the Sea,” a pirate movie, partly to buy Clayton’s favor after tormenting him.

Charles Tenney Jackson, writer of the book on which that movie had been based, had once paced a small garret above the movie theater while completing his work.

Clayton pushed on, unwilling or unable to get the attention of his brother Bernard who passed driving a jitney. Jitneys — usually 7-seat Cadillacs — competed with streetcars for passengers, and they charged the same fare, six cents.

Turning left at South French Broad, Clayton passed through what he thought was the most hazardous part of his journey, the mud cut. Here, where the tracks wound past repair sheds and through steep red banks, Clayton had to step to the side as a streetcar came upon him, sending off sparks on a cable above and emitting an oily smell he hated.

On the other side of the West Asheville Bridge, Bernard passed again in his jitney. Clayton did not holler.

Rounding Beacham’s Curve, he was almost home. He passed the bakery where his mother bought fresh raisin bread as a treat for him on their frequent errands. Nearing Virginia Avenue, he thought of May’s Market a couple of streets down, where his mother purchased fatback for the biscuits and gravy they had every day for breakfast.

Finally, he arrived home.

Before he lay himself down in exhaustion and relief on his bed, he told his brother William, “My feet feel like dog’s feet.”

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter